Humans are Underrated vs. AI

While there is a lot of focus on the coming business revolution through AI, there are many areas humans excel over machines. While businesses are focused on implementing AI in their organizations, it is essential to understand the limitations of AI. 

AI has impacted everything from media to e-commerce, reducing inefficiencies that are hard for humans to understand because of the vast amount of data analyzed. A lot of the impact of AI comes from taking huge amounts of data as an input and generating a response. Good examples of this are inputting an English sentence and getting a Chinese one, or inputting a loan application and generating a response of whether or not they can repay the loan. While this technology can produce amazing results, it is hampered by the vast amounts of data that is needed to provide accurate results. 

While there are limitations to AI, there are many developments that are being applied to try and correct for data-hungry models.  There is a growing movement to have AI think with a top-down approach. This has the potential to reduce the amount of data need to teach machines.  AI will continue to see improvements in the technology to get around the impediment of massive data sets, and this will impact jobs done by humans. Andrew Ng, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, states, “If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.” So many tasks are at risk for automation, but there are still many others that are not.

While there are tremendous advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence, there are still lots of areas that machines fail to beat humans. The first type of area that machines lack comparable skills vs. a human is in emotion. While AI can provide early detection for diseases, there is limited technology that can recognize human emotion and respond appropriately. It seems a bit of a stretch for now that a machine would reveal a bad health prognosis to a patient.

Humans also continue to outperform AI in creativity. Machines are great at understanding large amounts of existing data, but I have yet to see one take that data and give a presentation. Entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians all exhibit creativity beyond current technology. Other areas that AI still has not outperformed humans are in the physical world, and critical thinking. 

Robots have been seen in restaurants automating the food process, and warehouse fulfillment, but they still do not compare to people in nursing or construction. It will take time for AI to compete with humans in these fields. Lastly, AI still relies upon existing data to make decisions. Humans show a great capacity for vision or exploring edge cases that computers routinely fail to understand. What type of new business should one enter or areas with limited data, humans show much better skills to deal with these types of situations than machines.

While AI will have a significant impact on work, it is important to recognize current limitations and the areas that humans continue to succeed. Organizations should think about these limitations and find a balance between machine and human when making decisions. From Elon Musk, “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”